Last night's episode of Agents of SHIELD was pretty solidly entertaining — and all of the
members of Coulson's gang of misfits were both likable and good at their jobs.
Unfortunately, their hyper-competence comes at the expense of the rest of their
organization, which comes out looking kind of weak.

Spoilers ahead...

This isn't really a criticism of Agents of SHIELD, the TV show, mind you — huge faceless organizations
on television often tend to be kind of bad at their jobs. But still, it was notable how much of last night's episode depended on
everyone who wasn't one of our core heroes letting the ball drop.

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In the episode's "A" plot, a pair of students at
SHIELD's science academy basically build a WMD under SHIELD's nose. They then
deploy miniature versions of that WMD on campus, pretending to target
themselves, so that agents Fitz and Simmons will be brought to the Academy to
help investigate (because it's partly based on Fitz's and Simmons' technology.)
This is because they're still having trouble with the superbattery that powers
the WMD, and they hope Fitz will glance at it and come up with a solution,
which he does.

Nobody at SHIELD's academy thinks to try and trace where the
rare and expensive parts for these WMDs (even the miniature versions) came from
— and when our team does that, it takes them five seconds to figure out that
the source is Ian Quinn, the evil billionaire who was experimenting with
Gravitonium several episodes ago.

In the end, one of the two kids is killed, while the more
troubled of the two, the sad loner Donnie Gill (played by Dylan Minnette) gets
ice-based superpowers and is apparently becoming the supervillain
Blizzard.

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Especially since we're told over and over that the Academy
is full of cameras and rules, and everybody is watched all the time — which is
why the students need the semi-secret Boiler Room as a place to blow off steam
without being watched all the time — it seems a bit bizarre that these two
kids built a weapon that can create superstorms, and nobody noticed. But on the
other hand, I like the idea of SHIELD's science academy as a place where people
are constantly building insane shit in their dorms, and nobody bats an eye. I'm
honestly more bothered by the fact that nobody tries to trace the materials
after the mini-WMDs are used (apparently) to attack two students.

The thing is, the lack of basic competence on the part of
anyone who's not a regular passenger on the plane is kind of clever — because
it allows our core teammembers to shine by contrast. They ask the questions
that nobody else thinks to ask, and we applaud them for it. Plus we get to see
Fitz being a mentor to the troubled Donnie, Ward being charming and devious as
he roots out the conspiracy, and Skye impersonating a computer student.
Everybody gets cool stuff to do, and it's nice to see the team working as a
team.

Meanwhile, in the episode's "B" plot, we also find
out the secret backstory of Skye. Melinda May already knew that the agent who
dropped Skye off at the orphanage, Linda Avery, was killed soon after. But now
she and Coulson track down Avery's partner, Agent Lumley, who's been in hiding
ever since Avery was killed. (And May is partly hoping this fact-finding
mission will get Coulson's mind off the revelation that SHIELD did a ton of
weird-science operations to bring him back from the dead.)

So they catch Lumley, and he delivers the nugget of
exposition you can see above: he was part of a five-person support team for an
operation to recover an 0-8-4 (an object of unknown origin) from Hunan Province
in China. An entire village had already died to protect the 0-8-4, and then so
did the two agents sent to recover her — because the 0-8-4 was a baby.

And here's the part I don't quite get: there's a baby that
has unknown superpowers. As in, Lumley doesn't know what they were, and
apparently neither did Avery. Dozens of people have already died because
someone wants this baby, including seven or eight SHIELD agents. So they put
the baby into the foster care system, with a nearly invisible protocol designed
to keep the child moved around every few months.

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What if this baby's superpower is that she spits out toxic
gases every few months and kills everybody for a few miles around? What if she
occasionally turns into a giant superbaby and stomps cities? We don't know, and
neither did the agents who let her go. Also, the fact that they don't trust
their own organization to keep this child safe, once they've got her back
stateside, is kind of telling.

You begin to see why Coulson doesn't think SHIELD is the
safest place for Lumley right now.

In any case, though, this was a pretty fun episode, in which
everybody on the team got a chance to shine and the characters were actually
cute as opposed to having forced cuteness. The cast is continuing to gel, which
is a very good thing, and thecharacters
are also being written in a less one-dimensional way — this time around, May
gets to be talkative and caring, Ward gets to be concerned about the loner kid,
Fitz gets to be charming, and Coulson gets to be kind of depressed. All of the
main characters are opening out a bit.

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And to the extent that this episode had a point, it was
about what SHIELD means to these people — visiting the Academy lets us see
where Fitz and Simmons come from, and how this organization formed them into
the people they are. We see the wall commemorating the dead SHIELD agents,
including Bucky Barnes. We hear vague stories about SHIELD fighting Hydra.

And when Skye hears the truth about her origins, she turns
it into a story about how SHIELD sacrificed to protect her, given that a bunch
of SHIELD agents died and this one guy gave up his life. And she feels more as
though SHIELD is her real family. Which, okay.

So all in all, this show is coming along, and becoming
steadily more watchable. I just hope at some point, we can see both the core
team and the larger SHIELD organization being good at their jobs.

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Oh, and there's a promo for the next episode, in which Stan
Lee guest stars and apparently there's a series-changing event that seemingly
involves someone dying: